Musings and whatnot….

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Are Classical Liberalism and Postmodernity Both Oppressive?

I’m reading Rebecca Raphael’s very fine book, Biblical Corpora: Representations of Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature (T & T Clark, 2008). In this work, she makes a very interesting observation: “[T]he classical liberal emphasis on autonomy assumed a standard, able, adult body and said virtually nothing about the presence of disabled persons in the body politic; and postmodernism has reveled in a representational body subject to infinite choice and pleasure, as if the choices of real bodies were not constrained.” It’s interesting how we assume that our efforts toward individual autonomy and liberation actually accomplish what they envision, when in fact, there are always gaps in our perspective.